Vinland 120 Bottle Wine Rack - 12x10 Sturdy Wooden Wine Storage for Home, Bar, or Cellar - Perfect for Wine Collectors & Entertaining Guests

This is a decent wine rack. It's not overly sturdy and it isn't something you'd want on display, but it's functional.I purchased this to go in my unfinished basement, so I wasn't worried about looks - I just wanted a place to store my growing "collection" without spending a lot of money.The rack arrived in good condition. The pieces were nicely nested together into a 4' long shrink-wrapped bundle, about 5" wide x 3" thick, well-packed in a box. There was a "made in Canada" sticker on the outside. The wood, while soft (it's pine), was in good condition, with no splinters and only one or two small knots. The rear horizontal parts of the rack have a small round cutout to hold the bottom of each bottle, while the front parts have an even smaller cutout for the neck. If you are anal about how the rack looks, you might want to sand down the pieces before assembly, as there are some rough spots. Although the wood is unfinished, I don't recommend trying to stain it. Staining really requires a lot of repeated sanding and many coats of polyurethane, which would be a nightmare with 35 total pieces of long, skinny wood. Once it's assembled, it would be even more difficult to stain it. If you are looking for a nice, finished wine rack, this isn't the one for you! You will need to spend more to buy a pre-finished one.Assembly instructions were straightforward, although my instructions seemed to have been written for a smaller rack with only two legs (vertical pieces). The 120-bottle rack actually has 3 legs as shown in the photos. You assemble the rack by putting all of the rear grooved horizontal pieces into the slots on the three vertical legs, then screwing them in place with 30 screws. There are pilot holes for the screws drilled into the horizontal pieces, but not in the legs. This is a good thing, since the pilot holes weren't precisely placed, and there is no way they would have lined up with pre-drilled pilot holes in the legs. I placed the legs flat on the floor, then placed the horizontal pieces in them, making it easy to screw everything together. A cordless drill or screwdriver is highly recommended! The only thing to be careful of is not to screw any horizontal pieces into the slots that do have pilot holes, because those slots are used later for the cross-braces holding the front and back together. The process is repeated with the front 3 legs and horizontal pieces (another 60 screws), and then the cross-braces (9 total) are screwed into the front and rear to connect the two halves together. This is another 18 screws, for 138 screws total! Assembly took me about 45 minutes, but it could take longer if you aren't experienced at this sort of thing.The rack is fairly sturdy, but I screwed it to the wall with some brackets just to be safe. The bottles sit in their places OK, although there is nothing to stop them from falling out the back, other than the wall behind it. The front grooved pieces sit higher than the rear ones so the bottles sit horizontally. I would have preferred a rack that holds the bottles with the neck angled downwards, but this rack isn't designed that way.All in all, I'm satisfied with the quality and functionality of this rack. I think it's overpriced for what you are getting (a few lbs of pre-cut pine and some cheap screws), but it seems like the most economical option available for storage of 120 bottles.Kind of a pain to put together. Also, I have 3 which I have purchased one at a time over the years. The quality has remained the same and I have no major issues. However one thing I noticed from first to last purchase is the divits in the rack used to have a larger one for the cross bars in the back for the bottom of the bottle and a smaller one in the front to the neck of the bottle. The newest one has ALL larger divits like the back of the bottle one. I honestly do not know if this is a quality control issue or if they did this to reduce complaints of people who put it together not realizing the front and back bars were different and having to take it apart and put it back together. I did this my first time... But I don't actually notice a difference of feel it is actually a problem with all larger divits so I'm not dinging them on quality for it.The wine rack is really really light. Be careful to read the instructions before you assemble it - it has different sized grooves where different bars fit it - you can easily misfit it (like I did) and then at the end realize the rack is not aligned and then its very easy to break the wood if you try and pull it out unless you are very careful.Now, assuming you did read the instructions and put it together correctly, it is really easy to assemble (my son and I did in together in 15-20 minutes). Requires firm tapping/hitting to fit the shelves in which is good because its a snug fit.When I assembled it all together, it did feel a tad bit rickety - not as solid as I would have liked, but not bad either. For extra measure I tied in the legs to a pipe in my basement so it doesn't tip over (not that I know it would have, but given its so light and a tad rickety, I did not want to take chances)There is another wine rack on Amazon sold by a vendor called GE Lumber - I got that order but returned it because I had already installed this one. But just as a comparison, the one by GE Lumber was really really heavy in its case - so maybe that is more solid (even though the pictures don't look it). BTW, don't take this as a stamp of approval from my side favoring the GE Lumber product over this one. The biggest disadvantage of the GE Lumber product is that you are expected to stack two rows of wine bottles on top of each other while this one has a rack per row. I am not comfortable with racking wine bottles on top of each other without a separating rack in between, which was the main reason why I bought this one, finally.Overall, this one does the job, however at a 'Decent' ratingEdit: As of Nov 2013, this rack is still doing a fine job holding my bottles (upto around 120 bottles so far).This rack is a good value for the money. It is fabricated out of pine, which is a standard low budget wood to use for the racking of bottles. I have seen other racks on Amazon which look impressive, but they use cedar, which many collectors consider to excessively fragrant for a serious cellar. Redwood and teak are the woods of choice. But I digress. The various parts of the rack are attached to each other with screws, which are included in the kit. Such a connection method renders a satisfactorily stable rack, however the rigidity of the rack can be greatly increased by the application of wood glue in the joints prior to attachment with the screws. The resulting is *very* stable. I went to the local Rockler woodworking store and purchased not only Titlebond III glue, but also some nicer #8 wood screws (kit includes #6) with a bronze-like finish. I was so satisfied with the resulting rack that I just purchased two more.The rack can hold bottles of Burgundy. The slots are sufficiently large. The slack space is not ridiculously small.